In politics, when your allies start saying that you were never really that good, you know you’re going down fast. Stars fall a lot faster than they rise. This seems to be the case of former Clinton and Obama behind-the-scenes maestro turned mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel. The Economist summed up Emanuel’s problems this way:

Until recently Mr Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s first chief-of-staff, was widely considered a rising star in the Democratic Party, who may be lured away from Chicago by a cabinet post if Hillary Clinton becomes president next year. Though he has been the subject of controversy before thanks to his famously prickly manner and his pronounced penchant for the rich and powerful, he has never before been in such hot political waters.

400 protesters led by Jesse Jackson demanded Mr Emanuel’s resignation, while “#ResignRahm has become a popular hashtag on Twitter.”

In an unusually harsh editorial, the New York Times, usually a Rahm-friendly newspaper, said last week that Mr Emanuel had “demonstrated a willful ignorance when he talked about the murder charges against the police officer” who shot McDonald by seeking to depict the cop as a rogue officer. And that he showed “a complete lack of comprehension” when he fired Mr McCarthy, not because he failed in his leadership role, but because he had become “a distraction”.

Things continue to get worse for Emanuel. In the latest news, reported by the liberal site TakePart, just released emails  show that the mayor’s office coordinated its response to the police killing of a black teenager with the police and the city agency charged with investigating the police. According to the Chicago Sun-Times‘ story, the mayor’s office and the other agencies are claiming that only public relations was coordinated, but that’s not the way TakePart is presenting it.

Leading the charge against Emanuel is leftwing writer and historian Rick Perlstein, writing in the reliably liberal magazine The New Yorker. In “The Sudden But Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel,” which came out Thursday on the magazine’s website, he argues that Emanuel’s best ideas when he worked for Clinton and Obama turned out to be bad ideas, and that as mayor of Chicago he’s been part of — and was probably an indirect cause of — scandal after scandal. He doesn’t prove a logical case but does make one wonder why Emanuel is always around when things go bad. The article ends with this:

Now the sins of Emanuel are finally catching up with him. Lucky for him, however, the compounding police-shooting scandal has erased from the news a peccadillo from this past November: the mayor’s press team was eavesdropping and recording reporters while they interviewed aldermen critical of the mayor. A spokesman responded to the press by saying that their only intent was also “to make sure reporters have what you need, which is exactly what you have here.” That made no sense. But then so much of the legend of Rahm Emanuel’s brilliant career makes little sense. The bigger question, perhaps, is what this says about a political party and the political press that bought the legend in the first place.

Other lefties agree, like Perstein not so much making a charge that would survive in court but finding a pattern of behavior and relations that suggest Emanuel is up to no good, or at best not up to good. Lefty magazines have been running stories with headlines like Chicago’s “‘Black Site’ Police Scandal Is Primed to Explode Again” (Mother Jones) and “Rahm Emanuel’s Next Scandal? Chicago’s Public Housing” (The New Republic). Neither blame Emanuel for the scandals but they both suggest he’s at fault for not fixing them, and both point out how deeply involved he is in the city’s failures. Lefty website Salon, in an article titled “Rahm Emanuel’s catastrophic downfall,” opens with “Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is in big trouble” and refers to “Emanuel’s misdeeds” and “the despicable nature of what has happened on his watch.” The article called the Chicago he runs “so clearly a cesspool of corruption and racism.”

This is not a man with a bright future, even in a party that will forgive its favored sons a lot. There’s one other thing to be said about the falling star Rahm Emanuel: The fallen son may still cause some problems for the favored daughter. The Salon article pointed out that this affects Hillary Clinton:

People need to demand that Clinton truly grapple with the details of the scandal, and to ask her if her support of Emanuel really can be squared with her purportedly aggressive stance on criminal justice issues. She should be questioned about why she still has confidence in Emanuel when the majority of his constituents don’t. If she is really going to put her loyalty to Emanuel above what is so clearly a cesspool of corruption and racism, then she should be made to fully articulate that stance.

She should be made to say what she really thinks of Emanuel, but given the way the press treats her, she probably won’t. She’ll watch him fall, calculate the effect on her ambitions, readjust her campaign plans, and move on.